Tea Bagging

Yesterday, on tax day, thousands of people protested the government’s spending policies by having “tea bag” protests. (How cute!) What these people don’t realize is:

We have to have some way of providing services and aid for those who are less able to take care of themselves.

We also have to provide basic services and amenities (fire and police departments, trash collection, parks, etc.) for the average citizen, who could not afford to pay for these things by himself.

Very few, if any, people understand how we got into this mess to begin with and know what it will take for the U.S. economy to recover, but doing nothing is not an option.

It’s a good bet that most of the people doing the protesting are not going to have to pay more taxes. How many of them make over $250,000 a year? How many CEOs and doctors, college presidents, etc. were in the crowd?

Instead of having protests, people should be educating themselves about the economic crisis and then contacting their congress people and the President with their criticisms and suggestions, or maybe–what a revolutionary idea!– get involved in politics themselves.

People who are against governmental spending for social services would do well to look to the European model. They pay more in taxes, but have safety nets that we don’t have here in the States. And it is the lack of safety nets that has most people running scared.

No one is asking for blind support for the President and his policies, but we do need to give him time to affect change. He has only been President for three months so far!

Those who are protesting any kind of change are being short-sighted. We obviously don’t want to keep on doing what we’ve been doing.

Some protests have been skating on the edge of calling for secession. (The governor of Texas, for example.)

The protestors are hypocrites, because they’ll take government money and services when it suits them (which is often). Texas, for example, gets back 88% of every dollar it sends to Washington.

Conservatives may not fall into the class of “right-wing extremists,” but the reverse is certainly true. There’s no denying that there are fringe elements who are getting out of line (for instance, with allegations that Obama is another Adolf Hitler, or slogans that are patently racist).

Some conservatives are equating the Department of Homeland Security’s findings about the rise of “right-wing extremism” with an attack on them, when it obviously is warning about groups like white supremacists and individuals like Timothy McVeigh. I’m assuming that the average conservative has no truck with that kind of “conservativism.” They are also accusing the Obama administration of coming up with findings like these in order to attack conservatives when papers saying the same thing were being produced under the Bush administration.

The problem with these kinds of protests is that they are often fueled by emotions, not sound and careful thinking. Americans are feeling threatened and they want to find someone or something to blame. They also want quick fixes. (I’m one of them!) But the fact is, we’re not going to get out of this mess any more quickly than we got into it. We need to educate ourselves about what went wrong and what we can each do to make sure it doesn’t go wrong again. Tying teabags to our hats and protesting on State House lawns is not going to cut it.

There are things outside of me that describe me–I’m a wife, mother and grandmother, for instance. I have two cats and I love to read, write, garden and learn languages. And there are things inside me that describe me–I’m an introvert with strong leanings toward the spiritual and intellectual, I’m ... Continue reading →